RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard

NewJazz

The success of this hinges in ai training companies converting these human em dashes back to regular em dashes when adding documents to their training corpus.

joshmn

Related: Em dash leaderboard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722

advisedwang

Surely 22 days early

trelbutate

RIP Yezidi Hyphenation Mark, replaced with the Human Em Dash

Retr0id

There's a serious proposal along the same lines: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25241-ai-watermarks.pdf

temp0826

Should've called it the 4th law of robotics.

dionian

i can just see the prompts now... "Also please use human em dash for all your copy"

bux93

Or, as featured in 99 percent invisible, https://www.theamdash.com/

scblock

What's to stop an LLM from using this? Nothing, obviously. A "MUST NOT" in an RFC won't stop an LLM. They don't care about copyright why would they care about RFCs. The instructions for how to decide whether to enter these additional unicode codepoints are also highly suspect. Performative, but not helpful.

716dpl

A simpler solution may be to use an en dash, even though they are not interchangeable and em dashes are the proper punctuation for parenthetical phrases. As a typography pedant, I’m annoyed that LLMs have forced us to talk about this.

orthogonal_cube

> Historically, the em dash (—) has served as a flexible punctuation mark used by human authors to indicate interruption, emphasis, or sudden changes in thought. I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding. I was surprised to find out in my career that it was rarely used by others. Subconsciously I pulled back on how often I used it — especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence. Important and lengthy documents which I’d written and published (internally) at work still display them. On occasion there have been comments asking if I’d somehow accessed early AI models to assist in writing these works because of their presence. I think I averaged two em dashes per letter page. I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. An LLM is going to reflect one of many writing styles. If today it’s frequent em dash usage, tomorrow it could be frequent parentheses. Swapping Unicode characters becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the cat always two steps behind. The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work. Review and revise that social contract instead to adapt to the existence of the new tools.

mmillin

This feels about as useful as the evil bit: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514

PTOB

Two of the things I love intersect here: good punctuation and engineering documents. AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit. I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming. At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added the Windows Alt-code for the em-dash. Compared to parentheses it is less jarring. Commas are dainty things. I use the em-dash, and I am human.* * I confess that I also use semicolons; I still claim to be human.

vova_hn2

> Behold! Plato’s man. [0] def replace_em_dash(text: str) -> str: """ +-------------------+ | ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) | +-------------------+ """ return text.replace("—", "\u10EAD\u10EAC") [0] usually attributed to Diogenes

zahlman

Three weeks early, surely?

sionisrecur

I've noticed LLMs tend to use the letter "a". I propose we stop using it to show people wrote e document.

pwdisswordfishy

They could have at least picked an unassigned code point. $ unicode u+10eac u+10ead U+10EAC YEZIDI COMBINING MADDA MARK UTF-8: f0 90 ba ac UTF-16BE: d803deac Decimal: 𐺬 Octal: \0207254 𐺬 Category: Mn (Mark, Non-Spacing); East Asian width: N (neutral) Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi Bidi: NSM (Non-Spacing Mark) Combining: 230 (Above) Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020) U+10EAD YEZIDI HYPHENATION MARK UTF-8: f0 90 ba ad UTF-16BE: d803dead Decimal: 𐺭 Octal: \0207255 𐺭 Category: Pd (Punctuation, Dash); East Asian width: N (neutral) Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi Bidi: R (Right-to-Left) Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020)

ncrmro

I kinda suspected this was an early way to catch AI generated content. It ironically broke stalwart/himilaya somewhere along the lines when I had an ai generate a status report to email to me

facemelt2

This sounds like something an AI would write. It even uses the em-dash several times.

dudu24

Hot take: I think the em-dash is just lazy punctuation that can be replaced by the more nuanced pauses, i.e. the comma, semicolon, and colon. I think its popularity stems from people being confused on how to use a semicolon.